Social Media and Social Networks
Social media is often though to increase social networks because of the access it gives to reach new people without barriers such as distance. However, it has been shown that social networking with social media as compared to social networking in person and with traditional methods had surprising results. evolutionary psychologist Robin Ian MacDonald Dubar studied this relationship and found that online social networking does not expand the size of our genuine friendships. These relationships that are gained through social media are thought of as “loosely defined acquaintances”. It has been shown that social media helps to maintain already strong relationships between friends, decreasing lost strong ties for reasons such as distance.
We can look at these results in terms of strong and weak ties between friends and relatives. The social networking can help individuals to gain a lot of weak ties with people they don’t yet know. However, it is not adding any new strong ties. It does help to maintain already strong ties. If we think about the impact of a bridge, gaining weak ties through social media could help to achieve access to another friend group or another social network. If we think about the strong triadic closure property, a lot of connections satisfying the property would be newly formed. Since the newly formed relationships are usually that of weak ties, we would not see a lot of new connection between friends of friends. We would see the continuation of strong ties from already established friendships, and therefore the satisfaction of this principle with people who were strongly connected without the help of social media.
Overall the intent of social media helping people gain many strong relationships may not have been achieved, however there are other benefits to online social networking.
https://www.techwalla.com/articles/the-positive-and-negative-effects-of-social-networking